This anthology is a celebration of the city of London: "Noisy, stimulating, deadening, filthy, mysterious, tolerant, racist, crime-ridden, saint-haunted, ancient, up-to-the-minute, oppressive, liberating, crowded, lonely, addictive, and green-and-gardened, London is a microcosm of the World." These words, from Anna Adams" Foreword, give a taste of the breadth of subject-matter and tone to be enjoyed in this magnificent illustrated anthology. Writing from the Middle Ages to the present is divided into themes including "The Weather in the Streets", "The Poor and the Rich", "The Countryman in Town", "The Recent Wars" and - unavoidably - "London Transport".Writers include: Anna Adams, Fleur Adcock, W.H.Auden, James Berry, William Blake, James Boswell, Robert Bridges, Alan Brownjohn, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer, Amy Clampitt, John Clare, Arthur Hugh Clough, David Constantine, John Davidson, Charles Dickens, T.S.Eliot, D.J.Enright, U.A.Fanthorpe, John Greening, Thomas Hardy, James Harpur, John Heath-Stubbs, Stuart Henson, Frances Horovitz, Ted Hughes, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Lamb, Louis MacNeice, Glyn Maxwell, Felix Mendelsohn, Grace Nichols, William Oxley, Peter Phillips, Ruth Pitter, Thomas de Quincey, Kathleen Raine, Carole Satyamurti, Percy B. Shelley, Jon Silkin, Stevie Smith, Stephen Spender, Anne Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Vernon Watkins, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Kit Wright and Benjamin Zephaniah.